Ambitious approach, but a thing of shreds and patches

October 28 2002By John Slavin

Opera:Lindy
music by Moya Henderson, libretto by Judith Rodriguez, Opera Australia,
Sydney Opera House,
October 25 until November 2

There are crucial contradictions in Judith Rodriguez's libretto for this new opera about the Chamberlain case, which received its world premiere on Friday. They emerge in the opening scenes of act one. In the first scene Lindy (Joanna Cole) nurses Azaria inside the Fertility Cave at Uluru, a makeshift affair suggested by a partly raised curtain. She is ominously surrounded by rock paintings of Kurrpanggu, the dingo spirit. This is Lindy as the earth mother threatened by the savage potential of nature.

The second scene, however, pitches her forward to the last night of her ordeal in Darwin prison in 1986. In a nightmare she defends herself against her most persistent accuser, the prosecuting counsel (Barry Ryan) and the "mongrels of the press". This is the forensic Lindy, accused of barbaric practices by the excoriating cynicism of society and spiritedly defending her innocence. These double openings suggest a conflict of intention between mythologised victimhood and historical re-enactment which has not been reconciled by the opera's creators.

The problem with the Chamberlain case is that we know every detail of the story. It continues to hold the public interest because it puts a finger clean through a number of nerve ends of the Australian psyche. It challenges our nostalgia for the lost paradise of the landscape, revealing it as threatening. The figure of Lindy herself is a challenge to egalitarian tolerance because she was different.

The artistic possibilities then are either to keep the narrative simple in order to make a space for memorable music, or to reconstruct the narrative from a new dramatic perspective. Henderson and Rodriguez's Lindy does neither. After the ambiguous opening it settles down to a dogged, linear recreation of the legal procedures that tried to prove Lindy innocent or guilty. The scene on which the work hangs and the one at which director Stuart Maunder throws his limited resources is the drawn-out trial in Darwin in 1982. (Why does a major new work receive such impoverished production support?) ");document.write("

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Contradiction also pervades the score. It swings unpredictably from romantic lyricism to expressionist dissonance to rhetorical declamation and doesn't know which style finally to settle on. Conductor Richard Gill does a fine job of holding the resources of the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra to the mark and there are some deft features in the orchestration. Azaria, for example, is signified by a celeste. The prosecutor's inexplicable virulence is underlined by harsh trombones, while the disreputable intentions of the press corps, reduced to parody, are suggested by a blowsy saxophone.

Joanna Cole, with a rich and beautiful tessitura, is the linchpin holding the work together. Hers is the most richly emotive and conventionally romantic music. At the outset she is marked as the good guy, thus depriving the drama of any ambiguity or tension. The Lindy Chamberlain who found a remarkable inner strength while endlessly condemned by three-quarters of the population was far more complex than this literal study suggests. I find it peculiar, for example, that her religious faith is expressed only in her last aria. Fine singer that he is, David Hobson as Michael is scarcely sketched in.

The result never gets to the core of dramatic fusion and ignition. Too often the music accompanies, but doesn't deepen, whole swathes of legal cross-examination. The score is fatally forced to follow the characters' speech rhythms, rather than cut across them with its own expressive colouring. The unsatisfactory effect is of a romantic work about the inherent strength of women trying to scramble free from a pastiche of modernist discontinuity that the work in music and word deplores.